Archive for May, 2018

More frivolity on the modelmaking front as the dashing racing car takes shape. I changed material from corn flake packets to milk cartons, mainly because we don’t eat that many cornflakes as a family, but we seem to have an astonishing appetite for milk. German milk cartons have a sort of plastic film mixed with the card which gives them a good texture as well.

Once again I’ve been making life difficult for myself with funny angles and curved body on the back end of the car. I’m sure there’s someone out there with a mathematical sort of brain that can do a few sums and come up with the best possible shape, but I just stuck a scrap piece of paper over the body and traced the shape of the bonnet on it.

Meanwhile, I decided the front end needed sorting, not least lowering to a sensible distance off the ground to make the vehicle more “sports car” and less “Landrover”, while the mudguards would be useless perched on top of the wheel as before so I moved them to a slightly more sensible position.

It would have usual been easier if I’d thought this through and added the ‘springs’ (Strips of milk carton and bits of chinese takeaway box) before gluing the ‘axle’ back on to the body of the car, but still…

Over on the Lead Adventure Forum there are a number of people making very cool stuff out of cereal packets, cocktail sticks and assorted random odds and ends. This appeals to your correspondent, mainly because I am a tree-hugging bicycle riding hippy, and also because, being a tree-hugging bicycle riding hippy I’m generally short on money to fund any model making.

So when someone pointed me at a thread showing how to make a rather spiffy Fokker Trimotor from cornflake packets, handily in my scale of 1:55 or what tabletop gamers call ’28mm scale’, I got all enthusiastic about trying something like it.

Lacking the space for something as huge as an aeroplane, I decided to go for a 1930’s styled three-wheeled sports car. This could be useful in dashing tabletop adventures and would be exotic enough to appeal to my boys. At least that’s my excuse…

So far the ‘chassis’ is a cereal box card, with a piece of loo roll pretending to be a canvas radiator cover. The headlights gave me some trouble before I found that Middle Son had a bottle full of air gun pellets he thankfully wasn’t going to use, and was happy for me to take a handful. I drilled a hole in the pellets, superglued a pin in them, and sanded down the other side to make passable main lights. The sidelights are from round-headed dressmakers pins, treated the same way.

The wheels are made by sandwiching lots of bits of wire between several pieces of card, filing the result round and gluing a spliced piece of electrical wire insulation around it.

You can buy white metal castings for wheels. And having made two using my method I can see why…

I still haven’t give up on the idea of having headlights on the the Henschel diesel for the Körschtalbahn. While working on the cab I realised the various essential electrical bits I’d need for this wouldn’t fit in the ends of the locomotive. Instead I’d have to put them in the relatively generous space in the body, with wires running to the LED’s in the ends.

In a rare flash of forward planning, I decided to make sure there was a route for these wire to run from the ends of the locomotive to the middle so I could put the LED’s in place, finish the locomotive, and then connect the other complex but essential components when I had the money and inclination to add them.

The only problem is that the chassis unit I’m using is rather large, and based around a block of very solid metal, so the wires have to be threaded along a gap between the motor and sides. Then the wires needed to come up in the middle of the locomotive so they could eventually be added to the other bits of electrical gubbins, and the gap was deep down below the substantial bits of plastic that would be used to glue the sides to the chassis.

Above is my solution. When the wires are pushed from the ends down the gap, they should turn along the curved plastic and poke up through a gap, right next to the space where the rest of the circuitry will be kept.

If I’m going to keep that Steampunk vibe going on our rather implausible steam powered tank then I need rivets, and lots of them. This is a new problem for me as I usually make models of modern(ish) trains, which are welded together.

While working out how to make putting off the rivets, I made some heavy duty doors, extra wide on the basis that anyone leaving this vehicle will likely want to do so fairly quickly, and most importantly for the younger member of the project team, made sure the ridiculously large seven-barelled gun would be appropriately hidden when not in use.

So far it seems to work. Below, gun port closed:

Sliding a cunningly placed “Pipe’ on the other end of the tank pushes the gun forwards, opening the hatch as it does:

I’d like to claim this was achieved by careful measurement and engineering, but as long term readers will already know, it was mostly guesswork, and as usual I’m not quite sure if I could make it work twice.

Having done this I couldn’t put of the rivets any longer, so I bought some short brass pins from a sewing shop, and after breaking two drill bits making holes for them, I spent a happy couple of evenings gluing them on to the tank.

With my usual speed of uptake, I also realised that the kit we’d bought for the caterpillar tracks had lots of interesting detail parts, and added as many of these I thought I could reasonably get away with.

I’m guessing the cables were carried in case a tank broke down in the field, and I decided these would be essential. On an an engineering disaster like this I think it’s a bit optimistic hanging them on the back instead of the front…